I'm one of the people who get paid a lot of money to find 0.5ms gains, and yes, in this case it's hardly worth mentioning. Differences in frame time when you're sub 4ms really are not significant and are likely to be due to any number of bottlnecks which are unlikely to be present at more realistic framerates (when people like me might be more likely to care).

There's no indication here about hardware, drivers, or any number of external factors here. This is purely Valve having another dig at Microsoft in the press, because Win8 threatens their business model. There's a lot of smart people working at Valve. I'd expect better of them.

Unless you're providing some kind of financial incentive, I'm not sure why anyone would want to do it for you. But fortunately, what you're describing is doesn't sound particularly difficult. If you want to learn from the experience, you should really just do it yourself. You could put something together in C/OpenGL pretty quickly (there are lots of tutorials on the web for getting up and running with OpenGL).

Exactly. Unless the user has some experience in CUDA/Compute shaders/OpenCL, just shoving cards in there doesn't really solve the problem.

My scheme of buying computer parts to sell them on at a later date finally pays off.

It would have to be a pretty short range missile/chaingun. The range is something like 4 metres.

The daily mail says all sorts of things. It's not news when they write it, and it's definitely not news that they wrote it.

A CS degree is much more valuable in the long run. There is no particular advantage to a course like FS or digipen , even if you only ever want to work in games (in fact, understanding algorithms, data structures in depth is probably more useful)

Just make sure you can show some solid demo projects at interview. This is how I started out, and how most of my colleagues started too.